photo-breezing

always hyped to have a new red thing to photograph

hey ilp-
i just started watching this, william klein's series of short films about photographers, walking through waves of photojournalism/artists/& then conceptual photographers in ten minute episodes. it's so good! pretty much all subject-narrated montages of work by like sophie calle, duane michals, baldessari (who i never see without feeling like i have unduly shortchanged him my whole life by not thinking him my #1 guy), tillmans, &c&c&c. i looked & i think some are available on vimeo or whatever. but it's really good. bitesize. for while you eat.

How do people here use Instagram? If they do?

At first, I treated it like a photographic tweet - snaps with the iPhone, instantly shared. Now I wi-fi pics off the 6D to my phone, or even download LR-processed 6D pics from Flickr to my phone, square-crop, perhaps a filter, and then share. It's no longer an instantaneous thing for me, more a sort of short-term curatorial thing - something selected from my general, daily shooting with the proper camera, uploaded to Instagram every few hours.

I realise there's now a class of images which I wouldn't bother working up properly for the permanent online record of Flickr, or share on Facebook, but seem ideal for Instagram.

http://instagram.com/p/oSu1X3Lwt4/
http://instagram.com/p/oQBxa7rwnY/
http://instagram.com/p/oHYP7Lrwhf/

(Apologies if they don't work; I logged out and tested the links but I'm never sure...)

(And that was literally the first time I've logged into the web version of Instagram on a PC. They all look crap! Jokin')

something i imagine sometimes but which i'm generally not equipped to really render in my imagination is how nice it would be to have a subscription to aperture magazine

i just can't even imagine
like as far as i get is it's delivered & comes through an expansive actual letter window in a doorway, in a house i don't own, & then i collapse into this comfy minimal subdued charcoal couch to read it & then i black out

in case anyone still wants a mirror tube:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vario-Spiegel-Vorsatz-Mirrored-camera-lens-tube-special-effects-/310970741092

In London for a couple of days so popped along to The Photographers Gallery to check out the Deutsche Borse finallists. The prints of Richard Mosse's 'The Enclave' look incredible, they do the images justice in a way I don't think any magazine or website could - the only way i have seen them so far. Managed to behave myself in the shop (more photobooks than I've ever seen in one place!) and only bought Robert Capa In Colour. There were a few other tempting things, though.

There's an Edgar Martins exhibition on I'd like to see, but record shopping on Berwick St has left me with too little time to get there and then back to where I've to meet friends. Having a pint instead.

Realised my error, it appears 'The Enclave' is a film and the photos are 'Infra'. Either way, very good.

http://shophamburgereyes.com/collections/frontpage/products/internet-k-hole-vol-3

http://i.imgur.com/vI8y9j9.png

shitty cellphone camera pics >> film photography >>>>>>>>>>>>>> digital camera pics

recently at least

There's a hierarchy?

I was just admiring these game boy camera photos actually

http://i.imgur.com/LajEYUC.jpg

http://www.ironicsans.com/2014/05/new_york_city_in_2000_photogra.html

(Wow what an intentionally awful website name)

http://milkmade.com/articles/2718-Milk-Gallery-Presents-The-Magnum-Contact-Sheet-Exhibition#.U7aqxo1dWXj

it's like just as i'm finally getting to grips with latin i glimpse a teenager sexing demotically, &

oops, sexting

i see people do cool things with film all the time, & i'm still responsive to it. i am watching a lot of video, recently, old video tapes, & it's crazy how kind of powerful & different the images seem, now, just by virtue of having aged a little, betraying their age, blearily affiliating with your memories. & film is obviously that too; you can still use it without it being a statement on the medium, & otherwise you can use it for what it means for there to be grain, &c. but it feels like an established language. this is what china was talking about, forever ago, i think, about people going to shoot pictures of cars, because old cars look like old pictures. alleyways look like films, ripped posters like walker evans, &c&c&c. i see just the most everyday digital pictures & it's like they just have so much less weight. there aren't the parameters. some of the film photography i respond to is the kind we talked about, a little, like a lot of light, some bright surface catching natural-seeming neon colour, a girl with dyed hair or whatever. but even when i'm chasing those kinds of pictures i feel like it's because they're a kind of picture. like i learnt it. i don't know that that exists, yet, with digital, & i feel like there's so much more space to have the picture be an actual kinda slightly provocative picture, not a successful or unsuccessful variation upon an existing formula.

Not sure where our discussion of cropping occurred but I checked out the Magnum Contact Sheet exhibition & found this:

http://i.imgur.com/Z9Pv8q2.png

http://i.imgur.com/eBHdD2B.jpg

rewarding evening cruise through chinavision's photos, everything still fresh & busy

https://fstoppers.com/film/leica-loves-film-announces-new-m-type-127-fully-mechanical-35mm-film-rangefinder-37486

^ i do kinda half-interestedly cruise things like this but the price always feels like such a weird caveat. like it's almost not even a real thing it's so prohibitive.

meanwhile:

http://i.imgur.com/9TmnqBF.png

http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/inside_out/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Watkins_Peaches_sharp.sm_.jpg

carleton watkins

i wonder whether the lens redesign accidentally committed them to privileging medium- & large-format square photography in their front page content

Hah is the top story always a square crop

ready for fresh boring playground photographs every single day

On a tangent, surprised I've not done this before but after "a few" beers on Saturday night managed to knock the quality setting on my camera from RAW to basic JPEG. Took a load of photos yesterday before coming home and noticing what had happened. It's the kind of thing that's inconsequential but will bother me.

i believe the pros call that "raw dogging"

I did consider googling that at work.

Ray K. Metzker :(

yeah. rewarding google image search right now.

hey how is everybody doing in their photo lives. what's good.

Nothing is going on in my photo life right now :( but check this out http://instagram.com/p/oTK4a2whRa/

hey that's good
i like it now that instagram is less a thing about filters & is more a kind of diary

schlump I'm really into this tag rn http://www.modeschina.com/tagged/heartbreakclub

hey i had forgotten about this site

http://31.media.tumblr.com/ba04406ef621ef708bbd534e1958df88/tumblr_nd2kz2a9HF1s48vuqo1_500.jpg

these feel like watching neighbouring sounds, to me-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeDOSDOs2X0

being in the city at night & it really feeling unlit

Papa Cuppa
1 year ago
in reply to bv2112

This is capitalism

George Ricardo
1 year ago
in reply to Taylor Productions

sometimes random images say it all.

http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/inside_out/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Watkins_Peaches_sharp.sm_.jpg

― schlump, Monday, October 6, 2014 4:54 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ban this sick filth

http://www.volkerheinze.de/files/gimgs/13_eggleston.jpg

That's William Eggleston by Volker Heinze, right? As much as I love that image I can't help but think of this when I see it:

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--jQv3VBSV--/196fuarapyylmgif.gif

http://i.imgur.com/NSj7ban.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/gs22GJv.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/wncEsGq.jpg

http://www.julienmagre.fr/

That's William Eggleston by Volker Heinze, right?

yes! i didn't know it, or him, until yesterday, & i'm really taken. for what it's worth, in case it maybe saves you from banderas flashbacks, it's described by heinze as being eggleston asleep in a restaurant, in berlin in '85, so maybe needn't be understood as such a moment of ecstasy. it's a really beautiful, rich, layered picture i think, the overbearing red glow unavoidably intertextual feeling.

i really am not a portraiture person but his work is strong, i think. hung up on some of his ahnung series, too-

http://www.volkerheinze.de/files/gimgs/3_periskop.jpg
http://www.volkerheinze.de/files/gimgs/3_olymp1.jpg

those julien magre pics are neat, too; nice to go to her site, cruise into journal just for the volume of coolly lit home photographs. i have had such a strange time, recently, hungry for pictures & feeling kind of exhausted by a lot of the work & the presentation, too, of Photographers Online, using some kind of cargo-squarespace-wave site to show off, you know, bleached out foliage & girl hair pics. i found a site which reviewed & excerpted photobooks & felt refuge from it it, thinking maybe the best things were happening in books, now, nicely printed books and unaspirational cellphone snaps. photography is obviously so big but when i try to remember the people who are active, prolific, whose work i love, who i can consult online as a way of looking at something; there are six or seven. i don't think the complaint is about the lack of good photographers, just about the availability or closeness of new work, & the slightly hermetic tone of the things that are obviously done well - getting to click through a twelve-picture slideshow of gently glowing selected-best-frames kinda not satisfying, not real.

being in the city at night & it really feeling unlit

― schlump, Saturday, October 18, 2014 12:32 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

I think I'm in love with dark pictures right now

But yes being in a city at night, unlit

Life lived that resists the recording. I think most of those pics were scrounged from weibo, from people's cell phone cameras that are two generations behind. Tiny sensors struggling to make anything out of the life being lived at the shadow. Barest outlines but cohering in the way that comes from watching an artist dab at a canvas, everything falling into place but only after you fall still. IDK they evoke such memories in me, walking the city til dawn, the flâneur inside restless and sad. I want to go back, I want to be there.

I used to think that maybe photographers got boring as they grew older and released their 'mature' work but I think I'm beginning to understand and to see

http://i.imgur.com/H5pXsFo.jpg

This was me at 3 AM 4 years ago, coming home

I wish I were home

It would not be a gross exaggeration to say that, in the eyes of the young turks, a photograph that was sharp all over, that was fully exposed in the shadows, and that was not visibly grainy was insincere. To add artificial light to the scene was worse, it was simple fraud.

In rational terms this was nonsense, but in artistic terms the question was not so simple. To the new photographers the old pictures seemed planned, designed, conceived, understood in advance: they were little more than illustrations, in fact less, since they claimed to be something else—the exploration of real life.

The new style was also called the available-light revolution, and if one forgives its portentousness the phrase is useful. Photogra­phers had of course always used available light, which during most of the medium's first century was generally daylight. It was not until the twenties that artificial light began to be a standard part of the working photographer's vocabulary, and not until the early thirties that devices were marketed that would synchronize the light of a flashbulb with the operation of a camera's shutter. The possibilities of artificial light had been quickly seized by the picture magazines, whose editors appreciated the new tool not only for its ability to produce pictures where photography would otherwise have been impossible but also for the fact that it could describe a scene with sharply incised detail and a graphic simplicity that made the photograph seem clearer than real life. Artificial light was embraced with special enthusiasm in the United States, particularly by Life magazine, whose example in photojournalistic style was decisive. The more sophisticated users of flash photography quickly developed techniques that utilized several bulbs for a single shot, producing results that were less obviously artificial than those achieved by a single bulb attached to the camera. These pictures approached in their character the immaculately lighted Hollywood movies of the thirties, whose imagery came to be accepted as natural in spite of its uncanny, luxuriant clarity.

European magazines had tended toward a photographic style that favored ambience over clarity of detail—a sense of immediacy over the quantity of information conveyed. After World War II this approach began to gain favor in the United States. In 1946 Life lured the English photographer Leonard McCombe to its staff and stipulated in his contract that he was not to use flashbulbs.4

In 1948 the exhibition French Photography Today, selected by the American photographer Louis Stettner, was shown in New York at the galleries of The Photo League. Although Stettner praised the work, he felt compelled to apologize for its failure to meet American standards of technical finish, but added, 'It must be remembered that most of the photographers in this exhibition consider their work finished when it appears in reproduction form. And they print accordingly.... French photographers have not yet learned what Stieglitz first taught us: that a print can exist as a thing in itself." Beaumont Newhall noted that "admiration for the images was qualified by frequent puzzlement by visitors at the photographic quality of the work. How, they asked, could the League show prints so poor in quality?" But the prints that survive from that time by the photographers included in the show (among them Boubat, Brassaii, Doisneau, and Ronnis) today seem technically unexceptionable. In comparison to what would soon follow they seem in their craft models of conventional virtue.

The spirit of what was to come was presaged by a statement that Doisneau had written on the back of one of his prints in the Photo League show: "The photographer must be absorbent—like a blot­ter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment.... His technique should be like an animal function... he should act auto­matically."7 The new photographers who emerged in the next years followed Doisneau's advice with an abandon that he could not have envisioned.

By 1952 the new purism had been ratified (it seemed) by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who in his introduction to The Decisive Moment proscribed the use of flashbulbs, "out of respect for the actual light—even when there isn't any of it."8 On the basis of his own work, one might guess that Cartier-Bresson meant by this that if there was not adequate light one might go to dinner. The new photographers kept photographing with what to the casual observer might seem to have been no light at all, and on occasion made a coherent picture in terms of nothing but a pattern of glittering highlights—smeary white shapes against a black field. Although the picture might bear little resemblance to what an eyewitness might have remembered, it had about it a quality that one could at the time call honesty, perhaps because it was clearly different from the familiar varieties of artifice.

One of the consequences of the available-light morality was that its adherents were forced to work in graphic rather than tactile terms if the meaning of their pictures was to be clear. One could describe a head with a few broad tones of gray, but one could not with the same technique describe a crowd. The available-light photographer moved in closer and included less in the frame; the best of his pictures came to resemble posters. The new style sacrificed all other virtues to the virtue of simplicity. It was a style nurtured by the magazines, designed to produce pictures that would convey meaning at a glance. Eventually it produced pic­tures whose meaning seemed exhausted at a glance.

szark